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And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.
I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).
What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.
I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one: I want to make things, not just glue things together.
Nate
: ?It's hard to imagine a more simplified Babar than the one I know from the books, but here you go, from the author's book of preliminary sketches. This page's text translation: "Babar hurries to take Arthur and Celeste to the big store and buys them some fine clothes."?
Nate
: ?I couldn't track down the exact reasoning why Moses would be writing in Eden, rather then just about it. I think it might best be viewed as a depiction of an inspired artist inhabiting his work. Perhaps Moses is writing the section of Genesis about Adam naming the animals ... making for a double-inhabitation. (Thanks to my art-history-savvy friend Ben for the suggestion.)?